Saturday, January 9, 2010

Asemic Writing: Literary or Visual Art?

Asemic writing has been made by poets, writers, painters, calligraphers, children, and scribblers, all around the world. Most people make asemic writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen.

So is it scribbling or doodling? Not when it's created intentionally - as art - instead of functionally, as when testing a new pen. If, instead of doodling images, we doodle mock-words or even word-like representations, are we practicing asemic writing?

Educators talk about children going through distinct stages of "mock letters", "pseudowriting" and so on, when they're learning to write. Many of us made asemic writing before we were able to write words.

When does asemic writing become art? When a writer creates it? Or when a visual artist like Paul Klee or Mark Tobey creates it?

Looking at asemic writing does something to us. Some examples have pictograms or ideograms, which suggest a meaning through their shape. Others take us for a ride along their curves. We like some, we dislike others.

Clearly we derive meaning from asemic writing. But do we read it the way we read poetry or prose? Or is it mis-named? Should it instead be called "asemic art"?

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Welcome!

This is the Fiction International blog. Fiction International publishes innovative texts that grant agency to writers as political/historical actors.

Fiction International (FI) was selected as one of the "top literary magazines in America" among 2,000 eligible journals, according to Literary Magazine Review and over one hundred editors and writers. It is the only literary journal in the United States emphasizing formal innovation and progressive politics, with its thematic issues, its wide variety of controversial fiction, non-fiction, and indeterminate prose, and its visuals by leading writers and artists from around the world.

This blog will serve as venue for the comments of the current and former FI staff, comprised as it is of MFA in Creative Writing students and alumni at San Diego State University, under the direction of the highly esteemed guerilla writer Harold Jaffe.